Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text

Thanks to Anita de Waard for pointing me to a nice piece in The Onion. It starts 'Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.'

Have a look.

Early hospital sign

Last week I was at the Multidisciplinary Approaches to Discourse conference held in Moissac, in southwestern France. Moissac Abbey is a rather fine church and former monastery dating from the seventh century - part of which was torn down to make way for the railway in the nineteenth century (well, you can't stop progress).

This picture of a man with a crutch announces the hospital wing of the abbey. An early pictogram, in effect, as many people would not have been able to read.

Peat-free or not, it's a simple question

Buying some potting compost, I wanted to see if Levington compost has peat in it or not.  So I looked at the pack.

"At Scotts we are justly proud of our environmental record and our concern for the environment, both at our production facilities and in your garden. With this in mind we continue to develop outstanding, consistent growing media using a range of peat based, reduced peat and peat-free ingredients many of which make use of otherwise waste material. Over the last decade we have significantly reduced the proportion of peat we use in our composts and will continue to do so. We do not harvest from SSSI or SAC sites and are actively involved in helping the management and restoration of the peat land areas that we harvest from. As we continue to work towards reduced peat formulations we are continually introducing new materials into our products (continued on p 94)."

Thank you, minister, that's all we have time for.

Accused by Amazon

You can tell someone in the family is doing a PhD - just got one of those messages from Amazon saying:

"We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Education for Critical Consciousness (Continuum Impacts) by Paulo Freire have also purchased Art Education in the Postmodern World: Collected Essays (Readings in Art and Design Education Series) by T Hardy."

But we're rescued from Pseud's Corner by this other one:

"We've noticed that customers who have purchased music by Dolly Parton have also ordered Me & Bobby Maghee by Kenny Rogers."

It was ironic, honest.

Sam Sampson

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Sam Sampson last week. A co-founder of Sampson Tyrrell, later to become Enterprise IG, Sam was the person who brought Information Design Unit into the group.